Tea party hero rankles Senate GOP colleagues

Wednesday

Sep 25, 2013 at 9:56 PMSep 25, 2013 at 11:13 PM

By Jeremy W. Peters, THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz's crusade to dismantle President Barack Obama's health care law has helped cement his status as an emerging hero of the Tea Party and conservative grass roots. But it is stoking resentment and derision from many other Republicans, including his own Senate colleagues, who see his campaign as impractical, self-interested and potentially damaging to the party's electoral efforts in 2014 and beyond.

The episode has drawn unwanted attention to a deepening rift among Republicans who feel torn between warring elements. As the party looks to take the Senate majority next year and recapture the White House in 2016, the split pits an emerging, younger class of social-media-savvy leaders like Cruz of Texas, who claim the mantle of a resurgent grass roots, against those who believe their colleagues are recklessly pursuing a strategy that builds up individual political brands at the party's expense.

Some Republicans are beginning to complain more and more that with the help of outside, tea party-inspired groups, Cruz and others like Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky — both presidential prospects who battled alongside their colleague from Texas in the current health care fight — are leading conservatives to believe the current fight over cutting money for the health law is winnable when it is not.

"This is not a situation where you dig your heels in and Obamacare gets defunded," said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate. "I think people are willing to hope that's true. I wish it were true. Trust me, I hope Sen. Cruz's oratory convinces five Democratic senators to vote with us. I just don't think that's going to happen."

Cruz and others who insist that they can prevail in defunding the health care law, Johnson added, are misleading voters who are looking to them for leadership that the party has lacked lately.

"They just want anybody who offers them a path, whether it's realistic or not," he said.

Senators complained publicly this week that their phone lines had been clogged with calls from voters, many of them misinformed about the true nature of the health care defunding bill now before Congress, as well as the confusing procedural gymnastics taking place on the floor.

"We have people calling into our office every day saying, 'Please support the House bill,' " said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., referring to the bill that the House passed defunding the Affordable Care Act. "Well, I do," he added, sounding exasperated. "Do I think this has been a constructive process? Not particularly."

Cruz's 21-hour, all-night assault on the Affordable Care Act — which ended rather anticlimactically Wednesday after the Senate voted to take up a budget bill that Democrats intend to alter to their liking — has focused national attention on the 42-year-old agitator, who is only nine months into his first term in the Senate but appears to have greater ambitions. On Tuesday night as he spoke, his political action committee was hosting a $2,500-per-plate fundraiser in Washington. A television provided a live feed of his speech.

Cruz's efforts have helped re-energize a sizable contingent of conservatives who felt leaderless and demoralized after Republicans lost seats in Congress and the White House in 2012.

Groups like FreedomWorks, Heritage Action for America and Tea Party Express have relished picking fights with Republicans like Corker, whom they dismiss as turncoats. And this week they mobilized as part of a carefully choreographed and mutually beneficial effort to rally conservatives behind Cruz's cause.

A few days before Cruz took to the Senate floor Tuesday, members of his staff began reaching out to some of the country's leading conservative grass-roots groups.

They were cryptic and unspecific, saying only that something big was coming, according to one activist who was contacted, and that they should be prepared to activate their social networks and spread the word. They sprang into action once the senator began talking. They used the Twitter hashtag his staff provided — #MakeDCListen — to rally their followers online, and deluged their subscriber lists with millions of emails telling people to call their senators and demand they support Cruz as he pulled his all-nighter.

So far, their message of entrenched Washington Republican interests being at odds with the interests of ordinary Americans has proved to be a powerful one.

"We should continue the fight, that's what the people want," Paul said shortly after Cruz left the Senate chamber. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said they were acting as a last line of defense for voters who expected Republicans to act.

"A lot of people thought the Supreme Court would act. It didn't," he said. "A lot of people thought Mitt Romney would win, or some other Republican would win, and that would stop it. That didn't happen."

That message was also a consistent theme of Cruz's as he spoke into Wednesday morning.

Cruz and his allies in the Republican Party claim a big mantle: the voice of disaffected and restless conservatives, and some say that has upset the established political order.

"Every senator thinks that they're the center of the universe, and now it is literally the case that a very decentralized community has a lot more say," said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks.

"We now have a seat at the table," Kibbe added, taking stock of his detractors in the Senate. Voters, he said, "can choose their leaders based on who's performing, and that very competitive, bottom-up atmosphere is really what they're complaining about. They're like the dinosaurs seeing the first icebergs floating by."